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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2009 > August > 06
Thursday, August 6, 2009
A Shout-Out from Jimmy Buffett
It was late one summer night in the early 1970s.
I was down in Key West with my pal Capt. Tony Tarracino. We were sitting at the bar at his sagging, old saloon on Greene Street. He was chain smoking Lucky Strikes and nursing a beer as he told me fishing tales. I was drinking rum and trying to write down some of the stuff he was saying on my bar napkins.
A guy walked in off the street carrying a guitar and Tony called him over.
“This is Jimmy Buffett,” Tony said in that gravelly, smoke-cured voice. “One day he’s gonna be big.”
Buffett bellied up next to us and joined the conversation and from fishing stories we eventualy moved to talk of our families, especially our grandfathers.
Later, at Tony’s invite, Buffett went back to the bandstand and did a couple of songs. To be truthful I can’t remember the first one, but then he called out to Tony and me and said, “Here’s one you two might like.”
He sang “The Captain and The Kid” which is a story about his own granddad:
“I never used to miss the chance
to climb upon his knee and listen
to the many tales of life upon the sea.
We’d go sailing back on barkentines and
talk of things he did, tomorrow just a
day away for the Captain and the Kid.”
It was pretty magical listening to him right then and I remember thinking, “Tony’s right, this guy is something special.”
I’m reminded of that again now as some 20,000 Buffett fans — many of them from the Dayton area — turn Riverbend into Parrothead Nation tonight.
Buffett has sold out 48 straight shows in the Cincinnati area, going back to a half dozen concerts he did at Kings Island in the mid-1980s. In fact, that’s where the whole Parrothead concept began.
As Buffett writes on his website:
“Timothy B. Schmidt (Eagles bass player) was in the band, and we were playing a venue outside of Cincinnati called King’s Island. People had already started wearing Hawaiian shirts to our shows, but we looked out at this Cincinnati crowd, and they were glaringly brilliant to the point where it got our attention immediately. I said “Look at that!” Then Schmidt says to me, “They look like Deadheads in tropical suits. They’re like Parrot Heads!” He yelled to me in the middle of a song. So I immediately took the term and threw it over the microphone — the people identified themselves with the term from the get-go.”
That Buffett — a kid born in Mississippi and raised in Alabama — became the poster child of the tropics had a little to do with Tony.
The two first met late in 1971 when another of Tony’s pals — Jerry Jeff Walker — brought a mostly-broke Buffett down to Key West from Miami in his old Packard.
“Jimmy came in here, a kid from Alabama with cotton sticking out his ears, and I gave him a job,” Tony used to say. “Paid him $10 and a few beers and told him he had to play something people here identified with. I said, ‘Nobody sings about Key West - that could be your ticket.’
Years later Buffett’s paid triubute to Tony with The Last Mango in Paris. “
“I went down to Captain Tony’s
To get out of the heat,
And I heard a voice call out to me,
Son, come have a seat.
I have to search my memory
As I looked into those eyes,
Our lives change like weather
But a legend never dies.
I ate the last mango in Paris
I took the last plane out of Saigon,
I took the first fast boat to China,
And Jimmy, there’s still so much to be done.”
Captain Tony died last November 2. That night Buffett was playing a show in Tampa and from the stage he called out a tribute to his old buddy. When I heard about it it reminded me of that magical night so many years before when he did the same in Key West.
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